Establishing an apothecary and outfitting a knight.
Creative Staff
Art: Guru Mizoguchi
Original Story: Usata Nonohara
Character Designs: ox
Translation/Adaptation: Erin Husson
Lettering: Liz Kolkman
What They Say
A two-hundred-year-long nap has left Mariela the only alchemist in town-except that’s a secret she definitely won’t be sharing. In order to hide her true origins, she’s going undercover as a chemist in the hopes of staying off the radar. While preparing to obtain her guild license and eventually open her own apothecary, Mariela begins to connect with residents of the Labyrinth City. Slowly but steadily, it starts to feel more like home…Is her dream of a quiet life finally within reach?
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers):
Mariela continues her quest to build a new life in a city that has fallen on hard times. She’s still guarding her secret to advanced (for the time) alchemy and is trying to not run afoul of the people in the city who already control the supply of healing potions. For Mariela, a walking dictionary of alchemic knowledge, what the locals would call miraculous are beginners’ tutorials. She managed to save up enough to open her own shop, and meets new folks in the city who are trustworthy enough to cheerfully work for her.
Whenever she makes a misstep Sieg is there to catch her when she falls. Sieg remains under thrall as Mariela’s slave. His devotion to her is unwavering but how much of it is the spell and how much is a natural like of his owner? There’s something unseemly about it all. Plus it’s hard to garner much sympathy for the man who was once such an ass. He’s clearly a broken man after what he went through and he’s trying to atone but it doesn’t feel right. It would have been more interesting without the magical pact. If Mariela and Sieg were bound by a shared secret of her alchemy and then grew to appreciate their relationship it would have been so much better.
As for Mariela herself, she’s just a boring character. She is generically good-natured and childish, and unambitious. The petit girl has no real qualities beyond that and a general unease at trying to survive in a world new to her. As the title says, except she doesn’t need to dream of a normal life, she already has it!
Something about the way Mariela is drawn rubs me the wrong way. Sometimes her features look like they’re drawn in the wrong location, like her mouth or eyes. The other characters don’t suffer quite the same fate of skewed proportions.
Another problem I have with this book is something I didn’t notice in the first volume. The dialog is clunky as a broken-down Dodge. The jumpy pacing of the paneling doesn’t help and the combination results in an incoherent mess. Mariela’s speech just comes off as unnatural most of the time. I don’t know if it was just this awkward in the original Japanese text but it’s distracting.
The clunky pacing and rambling text made it more difficult than it should have been to track the plot. Add to that the crutch of videogame-like mechanics for the dungeon below the city and the lingering icky feeling of Sieg being a slave forced to obey Mariela no matter what and the overall experience makes it difficult to root for the heroine. There’s a lack of struggle, no sense of urgency, no desire for her to change the workings of her old city for the better. She simply is a wunderkind who lucks into good friends and servants.
In Summary
The Alchemist who Survived launches into its second volume only to limp along with plodding detail how to grow an alchemical business disguised as an apothecary. The larger problem is that the drama lacks teeth. We’re told that if folks discovered she was capable of true alchemy that it could be very bad for her. Yet everyone we’ve met that has an inkling of her abilities doesn’t bat an eye. The troublesome relationship with her slave, the lazy game-world mechanics, and Mariela’s overall blandness are just dragging down what could otherwise be an interesting premise.
Content Grade: C +
Art Grade: B +
Packaging Grade: B
Text/Translation Grade: B
Age Rating: Teen
Released By: Yen Press
Release Date: May 5th, 2020
MSRP: US $13.00 / CN $17.00